Just when you feel you’ve got the measure of Víkingur Ólafsson he veers off in an unexpected direction, and this new project, ‘Mozart & Contemporaries’, is no exception. Like the Bach album (11/18), this could have been a bitty affair, yet the result is anything but.

His starting point is Mozart in the 1780s (a subject so brilliantly explored in quite a different way by Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler CO – Sony, 6/21) and, most conventionally, he includes the Sonatas in C major, K545, and C minor, K457. He brings to the former – the so-called Sonata facile, which he first tussled with as an eight-year-old – a trumpet-and-drums verve in the Allegro, a conversational intimacy in the middle movement and, in the finale, myriad ways of phrasing the simple rondo theme, silence playing as important a part here as sound. In the C minor Sonata the bubbling ire of the opening movement contrasts with the limpid beauty of the Adagio’s melodic lines, which remain uncontrived even as they become more elaborate, while in the Allegro assai he begins almost unassumingly, making the dazzling fortissimo outbursts all the more dramatic.

So far, so conventional. But what elevates this recital is the way he frames these sonatas and Haydn’s B minor Sonata (No 32/47, which I found a degree less idiomatic than the rest of the playing here) with other short pieces, sometimes mere fragments positioned in such a way as to display them to their best possible effect – a sort of musical cabinet of curiosities.

If I had the room I could wax lyrical about every single track here but I fear that would take up the entire Instrumental section. So let me confine myself to a couple of examples. There is a sequence of pieces in D minor beginning with CPE Bach’s Rondo, H290, in which Ólafsson really nails its sense of improvisation and the composer’s delight in wrong-footing the listener, imbuing the passages of toccata-like figuration with an unobtrusive brilliance. The Cimarosa D minor Sonata then strikes a moment of calm and offers an instance of Ólafsson the arranger, as he has filled out the original score in a manner that is entirely fitting for a modern-day piano, treating each harmonic change to lustrous colouring. This takes us to Mozart’s unfinished D minor Fantasia, K397, which curls into life with hazy arpeggios, the more urgent writing dispatched with a lovely translucency. It’s left hanging, unresolved as the composer abandoned it, but instead of any contemporary ‘completion’, Ólafsson comes up with an alternative: moving from here to Mozart’s D major Rondo, K485, all bustling insouciance, notwithstanding the occasional dip into the minor.

The Galuppi F minor sonata movement with which the recital begins left me thinking that here was a composer I should get to know better. He closes with Liszt’s version of Mozart’s serenely beautiful Ave verum corpus, which is suitably haloed and subtly inflected. And if Ólafsson’s arrangement of the Adagio from Mozart’s G minor String Quintet was never going to rival Grumiaux and co in terms of emotional intensity, he instead reveals a pared-back solemnity that is surprisingly affecting, particularly in the more agitated minor-key writing.

The recording, made in Reykjavík’s Harpa Concert Hall, is entirely natural and helps set the seal on another winner from one of the most original musical minds around.